“Good morning,” he said.
“Darling,” she murmured. “Darling.”
He had no idea what time it was, but they had slept with the sun on them for at least an hour or more, judging by the way their clothes had dried. He saw the sleek line of her shoulder and the full swelling of one breast and her eyes followed his and a faint flush touched her check. The wound on her face looked clean and pink this morning. It was healing well. The swelling was gone. She made a gesture to adjust her tattered blouse.
“What must you think of me?" she whispered. “Please do not look.”
He smiled. “It's too late for modesty.”
“Forgive me. I was not myself last night.”
“You were wonderful.”
“I see. And this morning.”
“You’re fishing,” he said.
She frowned. “Fishing?”
“For me to tell you that you are beautiful.”
“I love you, Sam, even though you tell lies.”
He smiled and drew his arm from around her and sat up. She said: “I don‘t care if you do not love me as I love you, Sam. I don’t expect anything, really, except—”
“Stop worrying,” he told her. “Are you hungry?”
“You must take me with you now, Sam.” She looked frightened for a moment. “Promise you won’t leave me if we get out of this, and if you accomplish your mission.”
“I won't leave you," he said.
“Will you be able to take me with you to America?”
“Yes, we’ll work it out somehow.”
“Promise,” she insisted.
“I promise."
“Then there is something to live for, after all.” She spoke with the earnest sobriety of a child. “But you have your girl there, haven’t you?”
“I had one, once. Not now."
“Then I won't ask you if I can be your girl. We will know about it later." She kissed him and stood up, straightening her damp skirt and blouse, shaking her hair and making all the feminine gestures of a woman dismayed by her appearance. She went down to the edge of the pond and began braiding her long hair as well as she could by the reflection she could see in the still water. Durell studied the sun, orienting himself to calculate the direction he should take in order to find the car that Gregori had hidden half an hour’s walk from the dugout. He had no idea how far they had traveled in their headlong flight last night, nor in which direction. The swamps around him gave no clue, nor was there any sign of human habitation anywhere.
“You look troubled, Sam,” Valya said.
“We haven‘t much time. This is the last day of April, and tomorrow will be May Day.”
“All right, Sam.” Her face sobered. “I just thought, for this moment, we could forget.” She shrugged. “Come, I’ll take you to the car.”
He was surprised. “Do you know where we are?”
“I think so. Remember, I was with Gregori’s guerrilla hand for over a year. We hid in these swamps until I knew every pond and slough and every tree and bush. The ear is over that way. It isn’t more them a twenty-minute walk.”
Durell‘s watch had stopped, but by the sun it seemed about nine o’clock, according to his rough estimate, when they reached the paved road they had used yesterday. It seemed as if much more time had passed since he had trudged with Gregori to the dugout. The sunlight winked on budding leaves and a flash of red in the branches overhead marked the passage of a cardinal. There seemed to be no traffic on the road. He ran across it with Valya and found the trail where Vassili had driven the car to its hiding place and waited for a few moments, his senses alert for alarm. Nothing happened. The little ravine that hid the Zeiss was completely hidden from the road, and for a moment he thought Valya had lost it and led him to the wrong place. Then she touched his arm and pointed and he caught the gleam of metal through the foliage.
Durell stood up carefully and parted the brush to study the scene. It looked safe enough. The car looked untouched since they had left it. He glanced at Valya and she nodded. “It is all right, Sam."
“We‘ll wait for a moment.”
Nothing moved in the brush of the ravine. The morning sunlight felt warm on the back of his head. For five minutes he listened, scouting the area with all his senses. It seemed safe enough. But there was no scolding of squirrels, no flight of woodland birds. It was too quiet, and he was not satisfied. The car looked innocent and deserted, untouched since they had left it yesterday. There was no breeze; the tender young leaves stood motionless on the trees.
He waited five more minutes and then stood up.
“All right,” he told the girl. “Cover me with the rifle.”
She nodded and lay prone. Her eyes reflected tension and concern. He went down the slope of the ravine toward the car. He opened the door of the car, looked inside, felt for the key under the sun visor where he had seen Gregori put it. The key was there. He turned and waved to where Valya waited and she stood up and ran toward him as he slid behind the wheel and stepped on the starter.
Nothing happened.
There was a grinding sound and nothing more. The engine did not catch. The noise of the starting motor seemed shattering in the woodland silence. The gas showed half a tank of fuel still available.
“What is wrong?“ Valya asked.
He made no answer. He slid out of the car and went around to lift the hood. One glance showed him the tangle of torn wires from the distributor cap. Alarm screamed in him. He suddenly knew he had been cleverly trapped. He did not move from his position bent over the engine. The P.38 pistol was in his pocket, and after a moment of listening and hearing nothing at all, he took his right hand from the distributor cap and rested it on the hot metal of the fender and then reached into his right-hand pocket for the gun. His fingers closed over the butt and he looked up at Valya. She was standing on the opposite side of the car and he saw that she wasn’t looking at him now. She was looking at someone or something behind him.
Gregori’s voice came quietly at his back. “Leave your weapon where it is, gospodin. I beg of you. I do not want to kill you.” ‘
“Very well,” Durell said.
“Spaceeba. Thank you. Take your hand from your pocket—empty."
Durell straightened and turned with his hands empty. Gregori stood a few paces from him. The burly man was not smiling. His face looked bearded and haunted, lined deeply with pain. His right arm was in a crude and bloody sling, and he held the target rifle in the crook of his left elbow, awkwardly; but his finger was on die trigger and the muzzle covered Durell adequately enough.
“Are you alone?” Durell asked.
“Vassili and Elena are still at the dugout. You caused us a great deal of trouble, gospodin.”
“What happened to your arm?”
“It is broken. A stupid accident. The guards almost caught me and when I ran I tripped and tell and broke the arm. They did not catch me but they did their work successfully, even though they are not aware of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I am not ambidextrous. There is no marksman among us who could carry out our task, except myself. And now I could not hit anything unless I was as close to the target as I am to you. Valya?”
“I am sorry,” the girl said.
“Do not touch your rifle yet. You look well. You must have had a pleasant night in the swamps.”
"Not very pleasant.”
Gregori said: “What took you so long to get here, then? I have been waiting for you two since after midnight.”
“We were lost.”
“I see. Well. At least you weren’t captured. It was my greatest worry. I will need Durell now, more than ever. The car would have been folly, you understand. Everything has been upset by what you two have done. The guard detachment at the missile base has been alerted. We had to run and hide and run again through most of the night. They did not find the dugout, fortunately, so we are safe again. And the search has spread out beyond us, so we are inside the perim
eter of their efforts and we shall stay there. It will be safest, close to them. As for the car, Durell, you would not get more than three kilometers in it. All the roads are blocked and guarded with tanks and machine guns. We are completely encircled. You could not even escape on foot now."
Durell accepted Gregori’s words; he spoke too earnestly to be lying. He put the P.38 on the fender of the car and stepped a little away from it to place Gregori at ease. Valya stood with her hand at her throat, her manner uncertain, waiting for a signal from him. But he knew there was nothing to be done at the moment. The rifle in the crook of Gregori’s arm was pointed unwaveringly at him, the silencer on the muzzle awkward and black in the sunlight. Gregori came around and picked up the pistol in the fingers of his right hand, moving painfully with the sling around his right arm. A fresh spot of blood appeared on the muddy, bloody bandages. His thick black brows scowled first at the girl, then at Durell. He seemed to be trying to decide something, and then he made up his mind.
“Very well. We will all go back to the dugout. I was hoping Mikhail was with you. He did not leave with you?”
“No. He ran away in the opposite direction,” Valya offered.
“Toward the base?”
“Yes,” Durell said.
“Then he has deserted us,” Gregori said heavily.
Valya said defensively: “Do not condemn him before we know the truth!”
“No?” Gregori asked, scowling. “Then where is he?”
“Perhaps he was captured. Perhaps he is lost."
“Let us pray they have not caught him. He would break like an egg in my fist, and spill as much juice. I do not have your faith in Mikhail, Valya. I do not trust him; I never have. It is you who brought him into our organization, but I consider him too weak and temperamental for this business. If the troops have captured him, then Kronev is questioning him at this moment. How long do you think he could hold out against Kronev’s methods?”
Valya looked down at her feet, silent. Gregori sighed and shrugged and hitched the rifle to a more comfortable position. “It is foolish for us to distrust each other now. Death is all around us. If we quarrel and fight between us, we will all die that much sooner. Pick up your gun, Durell. And your rifle, Valya. We will go back to the dugout.”
Durell picked up the pistol. He watched Gregori closely, seeing the pallor on the man’s broad, strong face, the grimace of pain that twisted his mouth and dark, bushy brows.
“You say you need me more than before,” Durell said to him.
Gregori drew a deep breath. “This stupid accident with my arm. I am the only marksman in the unit; Vassili is not half as good as I, and Elena is totally hopeless except with a machine gun, which we do not have, unfortunately. What kind of a marksman are you, gospodin?”
Durell said nothing.
Gregori said, “When the time comes, you will be my eye and my arm, Durell. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“lt should be perfectly clear.”
“It is clear. But I am not a murderer.”
“You have no choice,” Gregori said quietly. “If you refuse, your entire mission fails. You cannot get out of here and reach Moscow to alert your Embassy. We are surrounded by steel and death, my friend. We are all trapped here, thanks to your attempt to‘ escape last night. What choice is left open to you now? If you cannot carry out your original plan to alert your Embassy, then you must stay here, right? And if you stay here, then tomorrow morning at a certain hour Comrade Z will come along in his limousine to carry out his first step to gain complete power through the confusion of war. Do you intend to let him do it?”
Durell felt cold. Gregori’s logic could not be denied. “And if I am not the marksman you think I am?”
Gregori said quietly; “I think you had better be.”
“And if I miss?”
“You know the answer to that as well as I.” Gregori laughed without mirth. “Come, it is not too safe here by the car. We are too near the military road. You do not have to make up your mind at this moment. There is plenty of time. Until tomorrow, eh? But I think, Mr. Durell, you will make an excellent assassin.”
Chapter Fifteen
THE DAY seemed to have no end.
He ate black bread and salt fish and drank bottled Narzan water that Vassili produced from his canvas rucksack, although Vassili and Gregori preferred the vodka that seemed to have no effect on them. It was calm and quiet in the swampy forest where they waited through the long hours. Now and then a helicopter With the red star of the Soviet Air Force whirled and plodded through the blue sky above the treetops, and once a patrol of green-uniformed soldiers worked awkwardly through the brush only fifty feet from the dugout entrance. They were not discovered. And there was no traffic except for an occasional military truck that came grinding down the road through the ravine to the bridge that Vassili watched.
Durell‘s post was with Vassili through the daylight hours That dragged by. Working with infinite patience, Vassili had cleared with his hands a narrow space from the rock ledge above the road that commanded the approach to the wooden bridge below. Through the avenue in the brush, Durell could see the sentry tower clearly, and even hear the murmur of the guards’ voices as they talked and smoked in the sunlight that filtered down through the trees to where they stood. Durell checked and rechecked the target rifle. He would have preferred to squeeze off a few shots to test the trigger tension and learn if the gun had any special idiosyncrasies. The sights were fine, and whenever the wind shifted slightly he made adjustments to account for possible deflection and elevation.
He had not made up his mind what to do about this desperate situation. He knew that if nothing occurred to change the situation by morning, he would have to squeeze the trigger.
The sun was hot in the clear blue sky. The rocky stream at the bottom of the gorge chuckled and gurgled. A truck came grinding down the ravine, halted at the sentry tower on the‘ other 'side of the bridge, and then went on. He heard the soldiers in the troop carrier laughing and joking. Dust lifted in a thin cloud and rolled over his hiding place above the road.
Durell looked at Vassili curiously. The man was only in his middle twenties, a child of the Soviet state, a man who knew nothing beyond Communist propaganda and a state-dominated way of life that had always regulated his every thought and act. There was intelligence in Vassili’s narrow eyes. Vassili‘s hair was like straw, and his eyes were a clear blue. His mouth was thin and sensitive. Durell said: “How did you get into all this, anyway, Vassili?”
The thin man shrugged. “How does one know which way life sets you to drifting? Something happens and you do something about it and in turn you find yourself pushed again by something else in yet another direction. My lathe broke down.”
“Your lathe?”
“I was foreman on a night shift in a Moscow factory. We made machine parts—I don’t know what for, they were small, fine pieces, like jewels—for something that we never saw and never asked about. I was doing well. I made almost two thousand rubles a month. I won the Stalin Prize for efficiency. All my life I studied at the technical school and worked hard. I was ready to get married when the lathe was ruined."
Vassili laughed with soft bitterness and rubbed the pale bristle on his jaw. He looked dirty and desperate, the epitome of an outlaw, and it occurred to Durell that he himself certainly looked no better. He saw Vassili grin, white teeth gleaming strongly, but there was no laughter in his eyes.
“Some technical recruits were put under my charge; they were supposed to be graduates of the technical school operated by my factory. They were supposed to be competent. I thought they could be trusted to do the work properly. Those lathes were very fine machines, you understand. I cared for them as a mother cares for her children.”
“Were they Russian-made?”
“German,” Vassili said shortly. “So they were hard to come by. Well, one of the recruits was careless and didn’t shut down the lathe he was operating when the
machining was done, and the machine was badly damaged. They got me out of bed that morning. My father and mother, too. It was five years ago, you know, and best forgotten.”
“What did they do to you?"
“I spent two years in a forced labor camp as an enemy of the state. My father, too. He died there with me. I don’t know what happened to my mother. She had to get a divorce, because nobody would give work to a woman who was married to an enemy and a saboteur.” Vassili’s laugh grated softly again. “They say that it has all been changed. They have granted amnesty to the poor devils still in the labor camps. They have relaxed the work laws. Well, maybe they mean it. Maybe things will be better now. But not if Comrade Z takes command. Then there will be terror again, and fists knocking on doors in the night. I hope, my friend, that you can shoot straight.”
The plan was simple, after all. Vassili had four hand grenades. Durell had no idea where he had gotten them—probably from his ubiquitous rucksack. When the limousine carrying their target approached the bridge directly under their post, Vassili would throw two of the grenades at the car. The limousine would be armored, or at least have bullet-proof glass, and the problem was to flush their quarry into the open, on the road or on the bridge. There would only be a moment or two, then, to pick him off before he found shelter either in the sentry tower or in the brush. That part of it was up to Durell.
“And what happens with the rest of the troops in this place?” Durell asked.
Vassili shrugged expressively. “I will have two grenades left. You will have some cartridges. Valya has the rifle you got from that sentry, and Elena can use the thirty-eight. We can hold them off."
“For how long?”
“Nothing will matter then, if we have accomplished our job.”
“Are you ready to die, Vassili?"
Assignment - Suicide Page 13